Final Blog Entry - A Letter to Myself

Foreword

This is my final blog entry from Copenhagen.

When I started this blog, I thought I was creating a record of a semester abroad.

I thought it would be a place to document where I went, what I saw, and what I did so that years from now I could remember the details. Instead, it became something much more valuable. These entries became a way of paying attention. They taught me how to notice my life while I was living it.

As I write this final post, I find myself less interested in summarizing the semester than in understanding what it gave me. Looking back through these pages, I see more than train rides, bakeries, conversations, routines, and photographs. I see evidence of a slower, more attentive version of myself. I see proof that a place can change you gradually, through ordinary days as much as extraordinary ones.

So for my final entry, I want to leave a letter for the future.

Letter to Myself

Dear Me,

Ten years from now, you will probably remember this semester in fragments. A city. A feeling. A version of yourself that existed before certain decisions were made. You might remember Copenhagen as a place where things felt quieter, more balanced, more intentional than life had felt before. Or maybe you will remember it as a turning point, the semester when something subtle but permanent shifted.

What I hope you remember most, though, is not just where you were, but how you learned to stay.

My blog changed that.

When I first started writing these entries, I thought of them as documentation. A way to keep track of where I went, what I saw, and what I did. But somewhere along the way, the blog stopped being a record and started becoming a practice. Writing became the thing that anchored me to the present instead of pulling me out of it. It made moments like standing jet-lagged at the kitchen counter, eating yogurt at an hour that made no sense, or staring out the window toward Rosenborg Castle on a gray morning feel like moments worth keeping instead of things to push through.

There were many times when I could have rushed through an experience mentally, already thinking about the next trip, the next deadline, the next version of myself. Writing interrupted that impulse. It forced a pause. It made me sit in moments longer than was comfortable. It made me notice when something mattered before I knew why. It taught me that reflection does not come after experience. It shapes it as it happens.

Sitting alone on the metro after class. Watching bikes pile up at a red light. Standing in line at Netto, realizing I no longer needed to translate everything in my head.

That realization feels obvious now, but it was not then.

Before this semester, I treated reflection as something retrospective, something you do once the important part is over. But writing week after week made reflection unavoidable and immediate. I had to ask myself not just what happened, but what stayed with me, and why.

Sometimes what stayed was unexpected.

The feeling of cold air on my face after the sauna before stepping into the water. The quiet weight of walking through Assistens Cemetery and realizing people picnic there, letting life and death exist side by side. The strange joy of Fastelavn, standing outside in the cold watching children swing at a barrel, feeling included without fully understanding why.

That question changed how I moved through the world. It made me more attentive, more patient, and less eager to label experiences as good or productive right away.

The change happened slowly. It came through repetition.

Taking the same route home until I stopped checking my phone. Returning to the same café. Recognizing faces without knowing names. Feeling the city become navigable without effort.

The blog also forced me to confront my instinct to stay busy rather than stay present.

Traveling through Europe made it easy to chase novelty. New cities, new museums, new foods, new versions of myself. But writing demanded that I slow down enough to notice what repetition was teaching me. Grocery shopping. Laundry. Sitting on benches with nowhere to be. These were the moments that gave structure to my life abroad, even though they would never be photographed.

That shift became especially clear when Jorey visited.

Showing my routines to someone else made me see them as real. Walking familiar streets with her. Explaining systems I no longer had to think about. Writing about that visit made it clear that Copenhagen had stopped being a temporary setting and had become a lived place. Something I knew how to move through, not just observe.

Travel highlighted this contrast even more.

Being alone in Budapest, writing in the same café each morning just to create rhythm. Sitting in a park in Prague surrounded by nutrias, letting the moment stay strange without trying to explain it. In Munich and Zagreb, the intensity of academic days was followed by evenings that felt almost unreal. Writing held those contradictions without flattening them. It allowed confusion and fullness to coexist.

This blog also made me more honest with myself.

Writing honestly meant acknowledging discomfort, boredom, confusion, and contradiction. It meant admitting when something did not live up to expectations, or when I did not know how to feel yet. Standing in the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, gagging through textures I could barely tolerate, eating bugs I did not want to eat, forcing myself through a hot sauce challenge that left my stomach wrecked, then laughing at the absurdity of choosing discomfort and staying with it. Writing let that moment be about limits and agency rather than spectacle.

Living here complicated many of the assumptions I arrived with. Some things were exactly as I expected. Others were not. Some experiences felt effortless. Others reminded me that being new somewhere means occasionally feeling outside of things. Writing gave me space to hold both realities at once.

Most importantly, the act of writing made me accountable to the present version of myself.

I could not skip over moments just because they were inconvenient or hard to articulate. I had to stay with them long enough to understand what they were asking of me. Long academic days. Overstimulation. Stillness. Homesickness that did not need solving. Writing did not fix those moments, but it made them visible.

Ten years from now, you will have moved on. You will be deep into medicine, living a life that rewards efficiency and forward motion.

That is why I am writing to you now.

I hope you remember that you once lived slowly on purpose. That you learned how to stay with moments instead of rushing through them. That you let writing teach you to notice your life as it unfolded.

This blog did not just preserve my study abroad experience. It changed it.

It taught me that meaning is rarely found in the highlights alone. More often, it reveals itself in repetition, in attention, and in the ordinary moments we almost overlook.

If you have forgotten how to do that, come back to these pages.

They are proof that Copenhagen was never just a place you studied.

It was a place where you learned how to stay.